Postcards from the Mountains of Madness

Insanity

Two days ago, a Connecticut Republican was arrested for grabbing a woman’s genitals.  Prior to his arrest, he allegedly exclaimed “I love this new world, I no longer have to be politically correct.”  In related news, a week ago, Jeff Sessions, said, regarding pussy grabbing “I don’t characterize that as sexual assault… I think that’s a stretch.”

Seriously, and I mean this, WHAT THE FUCK????  What warped world have we entered?

To begin, I have written several blogs on the idea of nostalgia, and how it is a desire to return to a past that never was, one that we imagine to be better than the present, and definitely better than the future.  At its base, it is pure revisionism that glosses over all of the terrible things of the past to present an idealized vision of things.  Nostalgia gives us “Gone With the Wind” and its visions of happy and comfortable slaves.  Nostalgia presents us the happy housewife.  Nostalgia creates images of smiling children that are seen but never heard.

In short, nostalgia warps our ideas of the past into a bizarre parody of actual life.  It removes all of the bad things, and elevates the good in a horribly distorted manner.  And on the surface, Trumpism would seem to be a nostalgic return to the 1950’s when the races were segregated; miscegenation was a felony; when women were completely subservient to men; and being a white male, regardless of social class, was the best thing in the world.  It would seem that Trump is trying to turn back the clock to a vision of how America would have been without Civil Rights, without Women’s Rights, and without Religious Freedom

The Trump World is not nostalgia, instead, it is a vision of the past through a dark and twisted filter; it is a desire to bring back, not the good things of the 50’s, but the evil.  It is a desire for darkness that, in all honesty, can be called Satanic.

First, let’s look at what real Nostalgia for the 50’s encompasses, and remember the fact that there is a significant amount of truth at its core.  The 50’s were a very prosperous time.  A man, even without a college education, could be the sole breadwinner, bringing home a comfortable middle class life to his family.  His wife would meet him at the door, with a drink in her hand for him and a nice dinner on the table.  Blacks and whites were “separate but equal,” and there was no racial animus. (Remember this is the nostalgic view of the 50’s)  College students were uniformly crew-cut young Republicans that would follow their fathers into business, and in due time settle down in their own white picket fenced heaven.

Of course, this is a false vision wrapped around a core or truth, but it is a powerful and penetrating encapsulation of what remains, even largely to this day. as the American Dream. 

But even if it looks like it on the surface, and even if the claims are that is the world that they want to bring back, Trumpism is hellishly dystopian vision of this dream. In the Trump vision, the man is head of the household, not through respect, but because it is his goddamned right, and woe unto any woman who dares challenge that.  The woman is not the happy homemaker, she is an ornament, a thing of beauty, to be discarded when the first inevitable lines crease her face.  And I will add, those lines will show up much too early because of the pain and grief poured on top of her by the husband who thinks of her in much the same manner as he thinks of his automobile.  And, like the car, she can easily be traded by the Trump Man for a newer and more exciting model.  No sedan wives in this new world.

The black man is not “separate but equal,” he is separate because of the bars on the cell he was thrown into at about the age of 14.  A cell he was cast into because all Black men are born criminals, and if one dies at liberty, they do so only because they have to good fortune to have done so before committing the murder that their genes demand.  (And acknowledgement to Adolph Loos for giving me this turn of phrase, although he referred to the tattooed, not to minorities, but it still applies here.)

And more, Trumpism advocates for literal concentration camps for Muslims (a group so small in the 50’s that they warranted no consideration, unless it was for the CIA to overthrow a government to install their chosen leader)  The Trump vision is also to load several million immigrants onto trains and ship them back to where they came from, on trains that would run day and night, week after week, year after year, to purge the country of the taint of immigration.  At this point, even the Germans are suspect.  Only the Russians seem to be worthy of consideration for entry into this country.

And finally, College students, like children, need to sit down, shut up, and accept the fact that they will take on a mountain of debt while being indoctrinated into the Republican Party, because all college faculty will have to pass tests of ideological purity to show that they are patriotic Americans who worship at the altar of Adam Smith, God and prosperous Jesus.  And after graduation, their compliance is assured, because they are literally slaves to a debt that they will never, in their entire working life, be able to discharge.  Welcome to Slavery 2.0, where the Masters pull their slaves strings through a combination of threats of debtor’s prison and the dangling fruit of the job that pays in experience, not wages.

George Orwell could not create a world more terrifying than Trumptopia, and H.P. Lovecraft could not envision a monster more amoral and soulless than The Donald.

And the news shows how quickly we can fall into this abyss.  A quick perusal of the headlines of the last few weeks, the race based attacks, the rapes, the hate that pours like sweat off of the brows of the men who now hold our fates in their greasy palms, tells us how far fallen a creature man is, in this time, in this place.

I’d quote Joseph Welch, and ask “At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”  But this is just beginning.  This is only the start.  And we have 3 days before the inauguration.  If people can feel free to throw away 50 years of societal growth in 12 weeks, what more will happen in 4 years?  How many more atrocities will we endure before we rise up and scream, “NO MORE, THIS FAR AND NO MORE.”  But I fear that there is much more, and this is only the prologue to a play of such cruelty and depravity that even deSade must turn his head.  This time coming up will teach each and every one of us Artaud’s ultimate truth:

“We are not free, and the sky can still fall on our heads.”

I hope to write a blog full of hope and talk about what can be done to stave off the darkness that engulfs us.  But not tonight, not now.  Right now, I need to take a shower, and weep for this brave new world that has such people in it.

God's Coventry

Theodicy

The spate of mass shootings in this country are enough to make people question the existence of a benevolent and omnipotent God.  The issue of how to reconcile the existence of loving God with the evident evil that exists in the world has been an issue for philosophers and theologians since the Age of Rationalism began. 

Gottfried Leibniz created a framework to reconcile these seemingly opposed aspects of the universe, while preserving the theological foundations of a Deity of Good.  He called his creation a theodicy, and it was one of the first attempts to justify the existence of God using rational thought, while also creating a framework to explain the evil in the world.  It is different from a simple defense, which does not attempt to explain the existence of evil or even help people understand why evil exists.

There are four aspects of a theodicy.  First, it must provide justification of the existence of God despite the evil in the world.  Second, it must be built from a common sense world view, which means that it cannot draw on obscure points of theology, but must work from common belief.  Third, it must draw from historical and scientific opinion, which binds it into the realm of logical argument.  Finally, the theodicy must be built off of plausible moral principles.

It was one of the first attempts to bring God into the realms of Natural Philosophy.

As this is an interesting theological exercise, in light of the events in Newtown, I would like to build a Theodicy to try to explain the horrors inflicted by armed villains.  I am doing this in response to the disgusting statements of people like Mike Huckabee, who claim that these mass shootings occur because we have "excluded God from the public schools."

Before I build my argument, I must address these statements, because not only are they vile in light of a tragedy that has left twenty small children dead, but also because if that is true, then God is irredeemably evil, and there is little if any difference between him and Satan.

In the Book of Job, God allows Satan to inflict disaster and suffering on Job, to prove that no matter what happens, Job's faith is strong enough that he will not turn away from God nor will he curse God for what has happened to him.  After Job's faith is affirmed, and Satan is proven wrong in his belief that Job only loves God because God has gifted him, Job receives back what he has lost.  While the story of Job is disturbing on a number of levels, in the end God is shown to be just and compassionate.

That is not the case if God massacres children to prove a point.  Unlike in the story of Job, those children will not come back, nor will they be replaced, as were Job's herds.  God simply obliterated them without mercy.

Even worse, if God is sending these things to teach us a lesson and out of anger that we have supposedly excluded Him from our country, how evil must he be to slaughter the innocents to make a statement.  The children have nothing to do with deciding issues like prayer in school gay marriage or any other social issue people want to blame. It is also quite likely the parents who are now grieving did not have anything to do with those decisions either.  To punish people who have done no wrong, and let the actual decision makers remain unsanctioned is an evil beyond belief.  If God is so cruel as to do these things, then God is not good or loving.

Since that is so alien to what I believe about a loving deity, I must reject it and with it I must condemn anyone who uses this sort of disgusting rhetoric to try to sway a grieving nation.  It is an act as evil as the initial massacre. There are things you simply do not do, and one of those is telling a grieving parent that their child died because America allow gays to marry or has taken Christian prayer out of the schools.

Instead, I must look at how this sort of evil can exist in the world, despite an all powerful and all loving God.  And through that exploration, I will try to build a Theodicy.  I do want to state, I am not a true theologian, and I do not know if this is going to be correctly constructed, but I want to try to rationalize, for myself at least, the issue of evil in the world and how God can permit it's existence.  

I am also not going to fall back on the easy explanation that the evil in the world is the result of Satan.  This explanation either neuters God, making him powerless to prevent the Devil from having Earthly reign, or it makes God a defacto accomplice, sanctioning the actions of Satan.  This explanation is what is called a defense, and would have been the rationalization prior to the Enlightenment.  As such, I would like to use a more sophisticated theology.

The core of the reconciliation between evil and God lies in the concept of Free Will.  I have explored this concept previously, in this blog post, but here I want to look at it from the point of view of God.  God gave mankind Free Will  and this means He cannot intervene, even when our actions are horrific and evil.  People make the choice to commit evil acts, and for him to intervene in these instances revokes the very idea of free will.

It is basically similar idea of a parent letting a child chose their path.  As a parent, you can tell when a child is going to screw up their life, but in the end, forcing a child to make the right decision keeps the child forever an infant.  There is no growth without the ability to screw up.  But beyond that, if God intervenes and stops someone from committing evil, the entire framework of Free Will becomes an illusion, because the underpinning is knocked out.

To further explain this, we have to look at the nature of Sin.  To commit sin, there must be two aspects, the decision and the action.  I reject the traditional Catholic view that the sin exists only in the decision, and the action is irrelevant.  If you decide to commit a sin, then upon reflection have recognition of the irrevocable nature of that sin and turn back from the precipice, then you have found redemption, and have not committed a sin.

Similarly, if you sin outside of a conscious decision, either because of extreme need, or being forced to, you have not actually sinned.  This covers the Valjean dilemma; stealing a loaf of bread because you are starving.  It also covers things like the necessity of killing in a war, possibly even if the cause you are fighting for is unjust in the eyes of God.  While the first is sanctioned by most religious authorities, I know that the second is morally questionable, because it skirts the line of the Nuremberg Defense.  However, most people would agree that killing in times of war is sometimes necessary, especially in a kill or be killed situation.

So, outside of the situations that may look like sin on the surface, but do not actually constitute sin, people have the option to chose between Salvation and Damnation.  For God to intervene and stop the actions that are required for the commission of a sin, He actually eliminates the option of Free Will.  At that point, we move into the realm of Predestination, that all souls are destined for Heaven or Hell, regardless of the decisions they make in life.

But why, then does He allow innocents to die.  Can He not contain the evil?  Unfortunately the answer has to be no.  For him to directly intercede in the affairs of man breaks the rules as well.  He would have to weigh the worth of all people, and choose who would live and who would die.  In other words, he would have decide who's life was worthy of being spared and who was unworthy enough to allow them to be killed.

This is problematic on many levels.  First, it eliminates the possibility of redemption.  Perhaps the person is on the wrong path now, but later recognizes the error of their ways and straightens up.  I understand that the concept of omniscience means that God would know if that person would ever find salvation, and of course He could arrange to only have damned souls die in these sorts of incidents, but then that leads to an even more horrific problem.

It means that everyone who dies in incidents like Newtown essentially got what they deserved.  It would mean that everyone who died that day was basically a horrible person who God decided to obliterate.  It also means that people would have no reason to grieve the losses, because they deserved it.  That is the Fred Phelps view of the world, but beyond that fringe, this is an idea that must be rejected.

So basically, God's gift of Free Will means that He understands that sometimes people will misuse that gift.  That is why He gave us the gift.  And further, if he were to intervene, he would either revoke Free Will, or he would make us have no sympathy for the victims, which would irrevocably harden our hearts against people who suffer tragedy.  In this view, Job would have gotten what he deserved and would not be a lesson in faith overcoming adversity.

There is a story about World War Two that is relevant here.  The British had cracked Enigma, the primary code used by the Nazis.  The secret that they had cracked the code was probably the single biggest factor in the Allied victory in Europe.

After the code was cracked, the British decoded that the Luftwaffe was planning to firebomb the city of Coventry, which at the time had almost 200,000 residents.  The attack that was being planned was unprecedented, and would certainly cause massive death and destruction. 

At this point, Winston Churchill had a choice, he could evacuate the city and build up it's defenses, saving hundreds or thousands of lives, but reveal that Enigma was broken, or he could do nothing, let the city be devastated and keep the secret that Enigma had been deciphered.  In the end, he let the attack happen; 800 people died, and thousands were injured.  Most of the city was left in ruins, and in the whole of the war, the only British city to take more damage was London itself.

But the secret was kept.  Thousands were killed or injured so millions could be saved.  Had the Germans known that Enigma was broken, they would have changed the code, and quite possibly won the war.  Churchill later said that the decision to not save Coventry was the single hardest decision of his life, and it haunted him for the rest of it.

In the end, you could say that the horrors that occur in the world are God's Coventry.

The Spectre at the Feast

Chaos

Let the acrimony and recriminations begin; let us point fingers and begin the most important task in these sorrowful times - assigning blame.  We need to figure out who is responsible for this horrible deed, because obviously there are accomplices who need to be rooted out and punished.

Every time there is a national tragedy, we engage in this blame game  We seek out or create villains in order to be able to dump the nightmare at their feet.  Tragedy becomes a political football, perfect for scoring points against all opponents. 

"This is proof of the war against Judeo-Christianity," said Congressman Gohmert.  "It is the sign of a broken mental health system," according to a HuffPo columnist.  "It happened because we have too much gun control," cries the NRA.  "No, it is because we don't have enough," claims Senator Lautenberg. "It is because we have lost the Christian rudder that steers the country," as countless letter writers to the Denver Post feel.

We search frantically, desperately to find some reason to explain this mass murder, and all such events.  There has to be a reason, some hook to explain the evil that men do.  There have to be collaborators and facilitators, who create an environment to allow them to do it in.  There have to be some motivational factors that spurred the actions.

All of this is wrong.

Sometimes people are evil just because they are evil.  To quote Barbara Hambly, "The question is always the answer if you need one badly enough."  Sometimes there are just evil people in the world who do evil things.

This is a very hard concept to stomach.  It implies that things can be senseless, unpreventable and unpredictable.   It means that we can't always keep bad things from happening, and it means that when they do happen, sometimes we will never understand why.

These thoughts throw our well ordered world into chaos, which is what Christopher Nolan's rendering of the Joker represents.  He is the agent of Chaos.

And by adopting that persona, James Holmes also became the agent of chaos.

I am not saying that he didn't have his reasons for his violent attack on innocent movie patrons, maybe he is insane, maybe he was on drugs, maybe he was acting out some sort of sick fantasy, maybe he was just trying to get revenge for some imagined slight.  However, just like we never learn why the fictional Joker rampaged through Gotham City, we may never learn why the man who claimed to be the Joker went on a real rampage in an Aurora movie theatre.  Maybe there is no rational explanation for why James Holmes viciously shot 71 people in cold blood. 

And this reality makes it that much more terrifying. 

A few years ago, I watched an episode of the BBC series "Torchwood," which normally revolved around finding and stopping alien attacks on humans, sort of a dark and twisted "X-Files" meets "Men in Black."  In the episode "Countrycide," the team investigates a series of disappearances, murders and cannibalistic acts that are so gruesome and evil that they assume that only an alien could be responsible; they were just too inhuman.  In the end though, the monster was a human family, and the instigator was the father.  He was the most vicious monster in any episode of the entire series.  When he was asked why he did it, his chilling response was, "It made me happy."

That was it, no further explanation or examination, no deeper message.  He did it simply because it gave him pleasure.  His simple statement still gives me chills, because it is at once both absolutely inhuman and utterly human.  The cold, calculating evil revealed resides in the human race, and we see it over and over again, and yet we cannot bear to look at it, because we see ourselves reflected in the face of evil.

So we have to explain it away, because otherwise it becomes a mirror of our own souls.  We all have the capacity for unlimited grace and absolute evil, but this is not something we can admit to ourselves and so we have to come up with other rationalizations.  This process leads us into completely unhelpful dialogs that distract us from the evil men do.

In order to show how these are distractions, I'll quickly poke holes in the top arguments that I laid down earlier.  To do that, I'll run though some counter arguments. 

"This is proof of the war against Judeo-Christianity."  I'm not actually going to even dignify this one, simply because it is a straw man.  As such, it is not worthy of comment.

"It is the sign of a broken mental health system."  How do we know he was insane?  One of his former professors said he was the "top of the top."  Yes, he was antisocial and a loner, but unless social disconnection becomes a mental illness in it's own right, this does not prove he was unhinged.  The incredible exactness of his plan and execution of it does not indicate a disordered mind.  We do need better mental health care in this country, but this massacre is not a foundation for why we need to make the system better.

"It happened because we have too much gun control."  No, not at all.  My father was an army major, and a strong advocate of gun control.  His reasoning, which I have not heard enough from the politicians, was very simple.  Soldiers and police officers go through intense training to know how to use their weapon in a high pressure situation, which is very different than hunting or being on the gun range.  Even with all of their training, you still get a lot of friendly fire accidents and collateral damage.  Imagine several armed people shooting in a fear situation in a darkened theatre.  There would be a lot more than twelve casualties.  Adding more guns into the mix would have resulted in more, not fewer, deaths.

"It is because we don't have enough gun control."  Also, a true concept in some ways, but utterly inapplicable in this situation for two reasons.  First, James Holmes never did anything in his life that would put him on the radar as someone who shouldn't be able to buy a gun: he didn't have a criminal record; he had never been treated for mental health issues; and he had never indicated that he was a threat to anyone.  Second, even with the best gun control in the world, a truly determined person will be able to get his hands on some sort of weapon.  If he hadn't been able to get a semi-automatic, he probably would have used more bombs, and made them deadly.  He obviously had the skills to do so.  The means might have differed, but the end would have been the same.

"It is because we have lost the Christian rudder that steers the country."  Christianity is not the only moral compass, all religious systems try to impart a rigid system of ethics and morality.  Also all religions have their murderous nutcases, just look at David Koresh or Osama Bin Laden.  Both of them were extremely fundamentalist and devout in their religious beliefs, and yet they caused more deaths that James Holmes.  Besides, this country was never founded in Christianity.  Remember, the man who wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights was a Deist, not a Christian.

So all of these frames that we try to construct to explain the crime are probably not accurate, they are only a means to advance a political agenda, and as such not worthy of further discussion.  We can justifiably look at a culture of violence or the motivations of the killer, but even these don't necessarily explain anything.  

Until or unless we get a statement from the criminal himself, we will never know his motivation.  Also remember, if he is setting himself as the Joker, anything that comes out of his mouth cannot be assumed to be true or valid.  Similarly, any explanation we give it is our own projections on his psyche, which also has no authenticity.

Therefore, we are left with the spectre at the feast, he did it because he wanted to, and because he was evil, amoral and twisted.  It is not a demonic evil, it is a human evil.  It is an evil that we can all understand, although most of us will never dance with it.  And no matter what we do, that evil will still exist in some of us, you will never stop it.

And because of that, we have to face an even more unpleasant truth than the fact that people are capable of real evil, and we will never know why.  We have to accept, no matter what we do, bad things will happen, people will be killed and villains will walk the earth.

All we can hope for is that most of the times the monsters will be stopped before people die.  All we can if they are not is band together and support each other.  Pointing fingers and laying blame does not heal us.  Bad things will happen, no matter where the blame lies. There is nothing we can do about it except stop blaming and start supporting those who are hurting.  Our accusations don't make their recovery any easier.